Nylon Calculus: Can LeBron James break the NBA points record?
Tuesday night in San Antonio, LeBron James became the seventh player to score 30,000 points in the NBA regular season. Now sitting at 30,021 points, how far up the list can James climb?
To answer this question, I looked towards my player projection model. This is the same model I used to project the top 23 and under NBA players and for my preseason NBA wins projections. The player model I developed compares a slightly modified and regressed version of what a player has done over their previous three seasons to a database of historical seasons. The model finds similar players statistically/stylistically and uses how those players’ games changed as they aged as a crutch to augment a generic aging curve to better tailor it to the specific player’s style of play and skill set.
As a disclaimer, there is a lot of error associated with projecting even a single year forward let alone the multiple years that this exercise requires but, using this methodology, I can project how LeBron James should be expected to age throughout the rest of his career.
There are two important things to consider when projecting James forward: how good will he be and how long will he play? How good he will be is simply the main output of the player projection model, a stat line based off an age curve and his most similar players. How long he will play is slightly more complicated.
To calculate how long James will play, I looked at the percentage of LeBron’s most similar comparisons that continued to play the following season. For example, 96 percent of LeBron’s comps based off his 2017-18 season played the following year. Performing this analysis for each of James’ projected seasons creates a basic model for how likely LeBron is to play in each successive season.
The regressed comparisons line is the one that I will use for this analysis. The difference is it smooths out the variance from year to year to provide a more accurate estimate. Combining this analysis with my model’s projections for performance, we can project how many points LeBron is likely to score during the rest of his career.
How many points will LeBron James score?
Based off my analysis, James projects to fall just a little shy of the all-time NBA record held by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
As mentioned in the above graphic, Adjusted Points is equal to the chance LeBron will play that season multiplied by the projected points if he does play. If LeBron actually plays until he passes the record, he projects to pass 38,387 points in his age 40 season. That being said, it is far from a guarantee that James truly would play that long, hence the final career projection peaking at 36,404 points at the end of his age 42 season (the last the model gives him an above 0 percent chance to play).
LeBron has long been a player who can beat aging curves, so it’s likely this analysis is under-projecting his chances of playing until his late 30’s. There is a reason that no one has touched Kareem’s record in the three decades since he has retired: 38,387 points is a lot of points.
LeBron James probably will not break the all-time points record, but he is the league’s best hope right now. With Kevin Durant coming on the horizon, there is a real chance that we are back here in a few years asking how safe the NBA’s all-time points record is.